Sunday, June 12, 2011

Exercise 4.4 - Variety with low sun

The aim of this exercise was to take some pictures at sunset and see, what the difference in lighting was. The object should be placed at a different position in relation to the sun.

For all four pictures white balance was set for Sunny and ISO for 800.

1. Frontal lighting - with the sun behind the camera. As can be seen on this picture, there is enough depth of field, the shadows and shapes can be recognized. None of the sides of the shots is under- or overexposed.

46mm; f/4.8; 1/1250sec

2. Side lighting - with the sun to the left or right. In this case, sun was shining from the right side. There are less shadows and the right side of the object seems to be a bit overexposed. Though, this kind of lighting can be used in interesting ways, when taking pictures of people faces, as one side of the face would be in light and the other in shadow.

55mm; f/5.0; 1/800 sec

3. Back lighting - shooting towards the light. The first thing you notice, when shooting against the sun is that shutter speed increases nearly twice. The other thing is that, by having sun correctly exposed, the object itself is underexposed. To have both, sun and object, exposed in a correct way Cokin gradual ND filters can be used. I personally often use P 120 and P 121.

50mm; f/4.8; 1/3200 sec

4. Edge lighting - sun is just outside the viewfinder frame. This way of shoots has resulted in upper left corner being overexposed. This could also be corrected by using ND gradual filters. The object itself is mostly in shade.

50mm; f/4.8; 1/640 sec

Summarizing this exercise, it can be concluded that different angles of sunset can be used for different types of shots, depending on what you want to achieve. Side and edge could be probably used for portraits to catch interesting angle and a shade. Shooting against the sun requires some filters, but helps to take really nice sunset pictures.